How to Optimise My Website For Google

Transcription

1 The SEO Crash Course Page The SEO Crash Course Insider Secrets To Hit The Top Off The Search Engines! By Mark Bowden & Jon Stringer All Rights Reserved Marketing Tips UK 552 Chorley Old Road, Bolton, BL1 6AB

2 The SEO Crash Course Page 2 Index: Introduction On Page Optimisation Think Pages Not Websites (4) Keyword Research (4-7) The Title Tag (8-9) The Description Tag (9) The Keywords Tag (10) Keyword Density (11) The H1 Tag (11-12) The H2 Tag (12) Bold, Italics & Underlining (12) Optimising Images (13) Navigation Structure (14) Anchor Text (14) Search Engine Friendly URL s (15-16) Off Page Optimisation Introduction (17) Google Tool Bar (17) Google Page Rank (17-18) Inward Links (18) Online Directories (18-19) Article Marketing (20-21) Forums, Blogs & Google Alerts (22-23) Linking Instructions (23) Press Releases (24)

3 The SEO Crash Course Page 3 Introduction Welcome to the SEO Crash Course. Firstly I would like to thank you for purchasing this system. I always like to congratulate those who are prepared to learn and take the required action to accelerate their success in both life and business. Throughout this course you ll learn insider secrets in a step by step approach which you can use to effectively optimise your website for the search engines. There are many sources of potential traffic for your website. However, by for the most existing source of traffic is obtaining good free rankings in the search engines and there s a little more to it than you might think. You ll learn the same optimisation strategies that we have used many times over to achieve page one and number one listings for both our own websites and the many clients and students that we coach. Search Engine Optimisation can be broken down into the following two areas. On Page Optimisation (Everything we can do on our website itself) Off Page Optimisation (Everything we can do away from our website to boost rankings) We suggest that you concentrate on your On Page Optimisation first and then set a couple of hours aside each month to work on your Off Page Optimisation.

4 The SEO Crash Course Page 4 On Page Optimisation Before we start let s take a look at Google and how Google indexes and returns results for it s search queries. Google holds a massive 70%+ of all search engine traffic so we want to make sure that we optimise our website for Google correctly. Get everything right for Google and you ll find that you ll also have great rankings in all the other search engines. The first thing we need to understand is that Google indexes Web Pages NOT Web Sites. When you think about it, it does make sense. Their main goal is to provide the most relevant results for the searcher in the fastest amount of time possible. Imagine if you searched Google for a particular phrase and Google returned a list of websites but you then had to navigate through each website to find the page that was relevant for your search. You d soon become frustrated and probably switch search engines. Because of this Google indexes Pages and will try to deliver the Page that is most relevant to your search. A website as I m sure you already know can contain many different pages and each of these pages can really only be optimised for 2 or 3 keyword phrases. So what is a keyphrase? A keyphrase is 2 or more words typed into a search engine. For example Fishing Tackle is a keyphrase, and so is Fishing Equipment Online. As we can only effectively optimise each of our pages for 2 or 3 keyphrases it stands to reason that we need to know which keyphrases we are going to optimise each of our pages for. It also stands to reason that we want to optimise each of our pages for keyphrases that are actually being used in the search engines by people looking for our products and services.

5 The SEO Crash Course Page 5 The good news is that there are tools available that will help us identify keyphrases that are being used on a regular basis. The Google Keyword Tool at... Is a great place to start. Take a look at the screen capture below and let s first explain what everything meas. a) Where you enter the keyphrase you are researching b) The keyphrase column (Google also displays related keyphrases) c) The Pay Per Click advertising competition column for that keyphrase d) The amount of times that particular keyword word searched for on the previous month e) Change this to Exact so the results are displaying accurately for that Exact keyphrase In the blue lines you can see the data for each keyphrase.

6 The SEO Crash Course Page 6 Lets take another look at that data. Here you can see that we have the results for the phrase that I entered Fishing Tackle (We recommend that you arm yourself with at least 100 keyphrases that might apply to your business before you start even though Google will display related keyphrases) At first glance you might think that my main focus for a fishing tackle website would be Fishing Tackle as there s searches for that keyphrase each month. But let s take a look in Google and see how competitive that keyphrase really is. As you can see Google has returned almost 6 MILLION websites that contain the term Fishing Tackle. This is a competitive keyphrase and whilst we might want to optimise for it, it will take a long, long time before we ll see our site on the first page.

7 The SEO Crash Course Page 7 However, let s take a look at some of the other keyphrases Google has also displayed data for. Carp Fishing Tackle searches but only competing websites. Or Sea Fishing Tackle searches only competing website. We ll have a much better chance at optimising for these keyphrases and will see results much quicker. In essence we are looking for a larger slice of many smaller pies. With a little more research we could easily identify a whole bunch of keyphrases that are actively being used in the search engines with very little competition. We can then easily create our pages and content around those keyphrases to attract targeted visitors to our website. Let s move on and take a look at how we should optimise our pages for particular keyphrases.

8 The SEO Crash Course Page 8 Title Tags & Meta Data Every webpage on the internet has a small piece of code that is used to help web browsers and search engines identify what your web page is about and how it should be displayed. This code is contained within the Head Tag Right click on any web page and select view source and at the top you will see the html code that makes up that particular page. Above you can see an example of what this will look like. As you can see inside the head tag we have the <Title> tag, the <meta name= description > tag and the <meta name= keywords > tag. This is one of the most important parts of a web page especially when it comes to search engine optimisation. First let s take a look at the <Title> tag. The Title Tag The title tag is where we tell the search engines what the Title of this particular page is. The title tag is also used in a few different places. First of all your web browser will display the title tag at the top of the browser window. Also when searching Google the blue clickable link that you click on to visit the webpage is taken directly from that pages title tag. Here s what this example might look like in Google.

9 The SEO Crash Course Page 9 When creating the title tag we MUST include our main keyword phrases for that page, but be mind full that people can see this in the search engine results so don t just fill it with keyword phrases. My example Fishing Tackle Fishing Equipment Online contains 3 keyword phrases Fishing Tackle Fishing Equipment and Fishing Equipment Online but is also informative to users. Let s take a look at the <meta name= description > tag. The Description Tag The meta description tag is where we can include more information as to what this particular page is about. Here we can use a couple of sentences to further describe what our page is about and again we want to make sure that we include our main keyword phrases for this particular page. In my example I might want to use:- The meta description tag is usually used as the snippet of text underneath the blue clickable link in Google s results. So again we need to make sure to include our keyphrases but also be mindful that this will appear in the search engine results. Here s what the above example might look like in Google. Now let s take a look at the <meta name= keywords > tag.

10 The SEO Crash Course Page 10 The Meta Keywords Tag These days Google doesn t pay any attention to the meta keywords tag. However, other search engines do still use it and it is still good practice to enter 3 to 4 keyphrases. That said if you keyword stuff your keyword tag you will negatively effect the performance of your page in the search engines. Enter your keyphrases into the keyword meta tag separating each keyphrase with a comma. We need to make sure that EVERY page on our website has correctly formatted title and meta tags. For example if I were to optimise a page on my site for Sea Fishing Tackle my title and meta tags might look like this. And on my Carp Fishing Tackle Page they might look like this Now it s all good and well having correctly formatted title and meta tags on all of our pages but if the content of our pages does not reflect what we have put in our title and meta tags we are not going to get good results. Next we will look at our page content and formatting text to add weight to our keyphrases.

11 The SEO Crash Course Page 11 Page Content Google and many of the other search engines can in-fact read the content on your page. It therefore stands to reason that if we want good rankings for our keyphrases we need to include them in the content of our web page. Typically speaking we would aim for a 6-8% keyword density. This means for every 100 words on our page 6-8 of them would be our main keyword phrase. Having said that this is to be used as a guideline ONLY! There s absolutely no pint in being at top of the search engines if the content on your page is un readable by your visitors because you ve squeezed in your keyphrase at every opportunity. If this is the case your visitor will simply hit the back button and find another site. It is always best to write the content for your visitors whilst being mindful of the keyphrases you want to optimise for. Having said that there are many ways in which we can format the text on our pages to add weight to out chosen keyphrases. The H1 Tag The H1 tag can be used once on each of your web pages. This will be visible on your website and is usually used as a headline for that particular page. Those of you who use a content management system such as Joomla will be familiar with wysiwyg editors. In these wysiwyg editors you ll find a text formatting opting called Heading 1 When you highlight the text and select heading 1 this will place the selected text inside a <h1> tag in the html code. << Here s a screen cap of dreamweaver demonstrating the h1 tag.

12 The SEO Crash Course Page 12 We should include our main keyword phrase inside the headline of our web page using the H1 tag. The H2 Tag The H2 tag can be used a couple of times on each web page. This works in exactly the same way as the H1 tag and can be used for sub headlines which again would contain our keyphrases. In wysiwyg editors this is referred to as Heading 2 Bold, Italics & Underlining Another way to add weight to our keyphrases is to make some of them Bold some in Italics and some underlined. By doing this we are indicating to both visitors and search engines that these words are important. However, once again don t just take every instance of your main keyphrase and underline it or bold it out. Try to add weight by using this strategy but remember your content must be easily read and understood by your visitors. So, now we have our web pages with correctly formatted title and meta tags, we have our H1 heading, H2 Sub headings and plenty of content containing our keyphrases with some instances of those keyphrases bloded or underlined, you might think that that s all we can do on a webpage to optimise it for the search engines. But what about the images you use on a web page? Can they be optimised to add even more weight to your chosen keyphrases? You bet they can! On the next page we ll look at adding even more weight to your chosen keyphrases with the images that you use.

13 The SEO Crash Course Page 13 Images Images can be used to add even more weight to particular keyphrases. Besides adding weight to a keyphrase and making your page more relevant to that keyphrase with Googles image search facility they can also be another traffic source for your website. Let s assume that I m creating my Carp Fishing Tackle Web Page and my main keyphrase is Carp Fishing Tackle. We ll also assume that I m going to include a couple of images on this page to spruce up the appearance. The fist thing I want to do is name the image using my main keyphrase for example if I m using a.jpg image the first image I use on the page I might want to call carp-fishing-tackle.jpg the second image I might call carp-fishingequipment.jpg etc The ALT Tag The ALT tag stands for Alternative Text. This is displayed when someone is using a text only browser or they have images turned off in the browser. What ever is placed within the ALT tag of an image is displayed when the image cannot be displayed. However, the ALT text is read by search engine spiders and again this is where we want to include out main keyphrases. Here s what the html code if an image looks like with a correctly formatted ALT tag. Next let s take a look at URL s and navigation structure.

14 The SEO Crash Course Page 14 Navigation Structure The navigation on your website is extreamley important when it comes to SEO. Firstly when a search engine crawls your website it will arrive at a page and will then follow the TEXT links that are on your webpage. If your website only contains image based navigation you ll need to include text links somewhere on the site so that the search engines spiders can find and index your pages. Ideally you would want to use a text based navigation in the first place. However, if this is not possible you can create a page which contains text links to your other pages and make sure your have a text link to this page from your home page. Anchor Text When we have a text link on the internet the text that you actually click on is called the anchor text. For example if we have a link Click Here The words Click Here is anchor text. The Anchor Text that we choose for linking to our other pages is very important and ideally should contain the main keyphrase of the page that it links to. Here s how my text navigation might look using the fishing example:- Here you can see that I ve use Fishing Tackle as a link to the home page. Sea Fishing Tackle to link to the Sea Fishing Tackle page and Carp Fishing Tackle to link to the Carp Fishing Tackle page. This is another way to tell the search engines what that particular page is about. In the next section let s take a look at search engine friendly URL s.

15 The SEO Crash Course Page 15 Search Engine Friendly URL s A URL is basically a web address for a particular page on the internet. A websites home page is always what we call the index page. This might be index.html, index.php or index.asp depending on how your website is built. In other words when someone types in your web address eg: it will automatically load up the index file. However, with all the other pages within our website we have control over the file names for example a contact page on my fishing website might be. The file names you choose for your pages can dramatically effect your rankings in the search engines. Using the fishing example again in an ideal world I would want the sea fishing tackle page to be named sea-fishing-tackle.html so the url for the page would become As you can see I have separated the words with hyphens - this is because Google recognises hyphens as word separators. Let s just take a look from the search engine spiders point of view once more. The spider crawls our home page and finds a text link with the anchor text Sea Fishing Tackle. The spider then follows that link and finds the page sea-fishing-tackle.html The spider then crawls this page and discovers the Title tag, Meta description tag and Meta keywords tag, which all contain the term Sea Fishing Tackle It finds the phrase Sea Fishing Tackle in the H1 Heading and throughout the content on the page where some instances have sea fishing tackle in bold, italics or underlined. It can also see that we have images relating to the term Sea Fishing Tackle because we have correctly inserted the Alt text for all images

16 The SEO Crash Course Page 16 If you are using a content management system or shopping cart software. You might not have control over how the URL is displayed. Many systems are data base driven and will automatically generate the URL and the page for you. If this is the case take a look at how your URLs are appearing for your categories. In many cases by re naming your categories or products you can include the keyphrase in the URL. Another option would be to speak to your web designer and discuss the possibilities of having search engine friendly URL s for your website Note: By changing the URL of a page you are effectively replacing the old page with a new page. If the old page has any natural rankings they will be lost as the page no longer exists. For this reason be carful when changing your page URL s if you have good rankings with the way they are at the moment, it might be best to leave them alone. Now we have effectively optimised our web pages so that the search engines can clearly see which keyphrases they should be indexed for let s take a look at Off Page Optimisation and go through everything we can do away from our website to boost it s performance in the search engines.

17 The SEO Crash Course Page 17 Off Page Optimisation Off page optimisation is everything we can do away from our website to boost it s performance in the search engines. Ideally you should set aside a couple of hours per month to dedicate to your off page optimisation and it is something you should continue to do throughout the life of your internet business or website. Those who stick to a regular monthly routine will reap the benefits of great rankings in the search engines. Before starting your off page optimisation there s a couple of free tools you might find handy to both monitor and assist with your off page optimisation efforts. The Google Tool Bar Download the Google toolbar at Once installed there should be a green bar at the top which will look like this:- If you cannot see the green bar click on options and enter a tick in the box next to Page Rank Google Page Rank So what is Google Page Rank anyway? Google s page rank is Google s method of calculating and displaying a particular webpages relevance and importance through the quality of other web pages linking to it. Let s imagine website A links to website B. This is like a thumbs up vote for website B from website A. If lots of websites link to website B website B s page rank will grow. It s worth mentioning that you can achieve great rankings with little or no page rank at all and page rank has no real relation to your ranking in the results. However, one of the ways we can boost our rankings is by obtaining good quality inward links to our website.

18 The SEO Crash Course Page 18 If Google sees that other websites are linking to ours then it understands that our webpage is a useful resource otherwise people would not link to it. So why is page rank useful to us. When we are looking to acquire inward links to our website our aim is to obtain links from websites that have a high page rank of 2 or more if possible. Gone are the days when link exchanging could benefit our website. If I exchanged a link with you eg: you link to my website and I link to yours they kind of cancel each other out. However, if my website has a much higher page rank than yours then in this case you might want to consider a link exchange with me. In a nutshell it s handy to know what a particular websites page rank is in order for us to make better decisions about link exchanges. Getting Inward Links Off page optimisation largely consists of obtaining links to our website. You might think that the more you get the better your site will rank and to a certain degree this is correct. However, relevant links are far more valuable. For example if I had a link to my fishing tackle website from a fishing tips blog this would be far more beneficial to me than a random link from an un related website that has nothing to do with fishing. Let s take a look at all the different ways in which we can obtain links to our website. Online Directories One of the best places to start your off page optimisation campaign is to register your website with online directories. The internet is packed full off online directories where you can simply submit your website details such as Title, Description and Web Address. In many cases what you enter as the title of you website will become a clickable link as well as the web address.

19 The SEO Crash Course Page 19 Now it s worth pointing out at this stage that if you spent all day and night registering with online directories or you used a service that goes out and registers your site on hundreds of directories all at once, your going to raise a few eyebrows at Google. Think about it. One day you have no inward links and then all of a sudden you ve got hundreds of identical inward links. Something's going to smell a little fishy! Google likes to see what we call a natural linking structure. This means that they should grow gradually over time and also the anchor text that points to your site should vary. Let s say I asked 100 people to link to my website each person would do this differently using different words in the anchor text. It s this natural linking structure we need to try and emulate when submitting to online directories. Start by writing a few different titles for your website EG: Fishing Equipment, Online Fishing Store, Fishing Tackle etc. (Try to use your main keyphrases in the title) Then write 3 or 4 different short descriptions about your website. Aim to submit to 2 or 3 website directories each month but importantly vary the title and description that you use when submitting your website. To find website directories simply search Google for Uk Business Directory and you ll find a few there to start with. Also try searching for what we call industry specific directories that might relate to your industry. For example I might search for Fishing Directories or Fishing Tackle Directories usually you will find a few directories that are relevant to your particular industry and these links will be extremely valuable as the links are on topic and relevant to your website.

20 The SEO Crash Course Page 20 Article Marketing Article marketing is a very powerful way of obtaining inward links if done correctly. On the bonus CD you ll find a great interview with Mark Bowden & Steve Shaw of SubmitYourArticle.Com. I highly recommend you listen to that interview as it reveals some great tips on how to get the most from your article marketing efforts. Here s how it works! There are literally BILLIONS of websites online catering for literally any topic you care to mention. A great deal of them are always looking out for fresh content to use on their websites and blogs, many of them will hunt for content at article directory websites websites such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com When they find an article they like they can simply copy and paste that article to their website saving them time and effort. However, the pre requisite for them using the article is that they agree to include a bio line about the author at the bottom of the article and yes you ve guessed it a link to the authors website. Now, that all sounds great, literally thousands of webmasters all looking for fresh content and you can easily see how this can really ramp up your quality inward links, yet I see so many people getting it all wrong so pay close attention here! Article Marketing Rule Number 1: When writing your articles refrain from pitching your wares or saying how great your website is. In fact, make NO reference to your website, period! Remember the goal here is for a webmaster to use our article on their website and hence generating an inward link to our website. Webmasters will not use your article if you are trying to sell your services in the article itself as it has no value to their visitors.

21 The SEO Crash Course Page 21 By the same token we want to make sure our article stands out from the pack so that it gets used. An article needs to have a great headline to really grab peoples attention and draw them in. For example if I was to write an article on fishing I might use some of these headlines. Top 10 Tips To Catch Bigger Fish Avoid These 5 Baiting Mistakes Made By 94% Of Anglers 94% Off Fishermen Make These 5 Baiting Mistakes You get the idea! Article s with headlines that draw in your attention and create curiosity will get used far more than others. Take a look at the bottom headline. When you see this you want to know if you are one of the 94% making the baiting mistakes. Obviously we would then write the article giving great value to the reader. At all the article directory websites we can create an Author Bio Line which is where we can include our details and of course a link to our website. For my fishing example I might use For more great fishing advice and fishing tackle tips by Jon Stringer visit Once again our goal is to get an inward link to the website for search engine optimisation purposes so get imaginative and write some great articles. Ideally you would want to submit one article per month on an ongoing basis you can do more if you wish. However, consistency is the key and one article per month should not take to much time out of your life and is easily achievable. Ideally you want to submit your article to as many article directories as possible. and are a great place to start. For the more serious article marketer you might want to use a service such as where you submit one article and then submityourarticle.com will then submit your article to many article directories automatically.

22 The SEO Crash Course Page 22 Forums & Blogs Engaging in forums and blogs can be another way to generate inward links to your website. However, it is easy to get distracted and waste a lot of time so here s our little formula for getting involved in forums and blogs without wasting your valuable time. Google Alerts Google Alerts will notify you of fresh new content added to the web in forums & blogs containing the search term you specify. Let s say I want to be notified of new content added to the internet that contains the term where to buy fishing tackle Once I ve set up Google alerts every time that term appears on a new blog page, web page or forum I will be sent an with a link to it. I can then easily enter the conversation and leave my link in the blog comment or in the forum. It s worth pointing out that you need to be a little covert and try not to come across like you are selling as your hard work will simply be deleted. Try to enter the conversation and offer value.

23 The SEO Crash Course Page 23 Also when setting up Google alerts make sure to putt the keyphrases that you want to be notified about in speech marks eg: otherwise you will be notified each time each word appears on a web page which will get quite annoying and defeat the object of finding relevant new content to comment on. Provide Link Instructions It sounds so obvious yet almost every website neglects to inform visitors how to link to the website. Sure you re not going to get thousands of people clambering over each other to link to your site. However, taking a little time to create a page giving instructions to your visitors on how to link to your website will help. This also give you the opportunity to encourage any one who wants to link to you to use your main keyphrase in the anchor text. Here s how Rory of provides linking instructions on his website. Here you can see that Rory has provided copy and paste code so that people can easily add the link to their website. Importantly by doing this he can ensure that the link itself contains his main keyphrase Caravan Transport in the anchor text. Like I explained earlier you re not going to get thousands of people using your linking instructions but those that do will have a correctly formatted link containing your main keyphrases. Let s now take a look at press releases.

24 The SEO Crash Course Page 24 Online Press Releases Online press releases whilst helping to boost your search engine rankings can also drive a significant amount of traffic. Unlike article marketing here s where you can blow your own trumpet and rave about your products & services. When writing a press release try to write it from a reporters perspective. For example if I wanted to write a press release for the launch of my new fishing website I would write it as an outsider writing about my business. To get a feel for what a good press release looks like visit You can write about anything you think is newsworthy in your industry or business and unlike article marketing here you can include links to your website within the press release itself. Once submitted your press release will be syndicated and distributed through many channels online creating traffic, inward links and buzz about your business. You can submit press releases as often as you like. Let s say you ve added a new range of products to your website or you ve launched an affiliate programme then write a press release and let the world know about it! There are free press release websites online. However, if you really want press releases to work well use their service is very powerful and extremely cost effective. Remember Off Page Optimisation is something that should be done on an ongoing basis. Little and often is the best way to consistently work on your off page optimisation efforts. To start with try to achieve the following tasks. 2-3 Directory Listings Per Month, 2-3 Forum & Blog Comments Per Month, 1 Article Submission Per Month and 3 to 4 Press releases throughout the year.